Summer Break
So, I had planned to keep updating over the next two weeks while I traveled and though I do have a few entries in the queue for y’all, I’ve decided to skip it. Scrambling to find internet connections and uploading mp3s is no way to spend one’s vacation. So, consider this a lil summer break with posting to resume in two weeks, on August 5th. Have a nice rest of July everyone, and we’ll share more tunes in August!
(contributors, please keep sending stuff my way, I hope to make edits and drafts and such on airplanes and trains)
Okkervil River :: Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas
When I lived on Kenmore we’d have a show in our basement every Valentine’s Day. We called it the Black Valentine party and we’d invite some friends to join us in performing acoustic heartbreakers to the 40-odd folks that would gather. Cats would pile-in, drinking, sit crossed-legged in silence in our dark basement, watching their pals belt out broke winter songs about the trouble we were in.
‘Cos we were in trouble. Working terrible jobs, living in crummy apartments, falling out of love fiercely. G had busted her teeth out, wasted riding her bike, and I fainted from the smell of her blood while S called Cook County. A was nine hundred miles away studying ducks. M had met someone in Tennessee who moved to our city and then it didn’t work out. As for me, I don’t think it’s fair to speak of the trouble I was in; that’s someone else’s story to tell. But worst of all, we each still believed that if we sang strong enough, maybe, maybe, somehow, something…
There are countless reasons I adore Okkervil River. Their sense of the basic musicality of language is totally unparalleled. I think the arrangements are brilliant; I think the care they take in borrowing from pop history is so smart. But I love this song, because I think everyone has a “Sarah in New Hampshire.”
Lover or friend or sister, the person we left behind forever, emotionally or geographically, because we thought we had somewhere else we needed to be. Sarah, the ghost that stands in as old home for us, to whom, in our dark hours, we imagine ourselves retreating.
M played the Otis Redding tune that Okkervil River borrows from here, on one of those Black Valentines. On those nights, we were trying, desperate, to make a kind of home there together. So we sang, asking our friends to be new Sarahs enfleshed and hoping they might convince us to continue remembering the now threatened dreams that had led us all there.
Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas (8.9MB MP3)
Okkervil River (homepage)
yourfavoritetune.com
hey dorks — we have a real sweet website now: you’ll notice our url is now http://yourfavoritetune.com — pretty cool, eh? The old link should still work for awhile. TenseForms Mike kindly moved us here, holler if you notice any wonkies. And tell yr peoples where we live now.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds :: God’s Hotel
I don’t know much about heaven, but when I take my last long stroll into that winterlit forever I hope I get the chance (assuming he is not a cursed earthbound immortal) to bunk with Nick Cave for a minute. His is a heaven I can get with. And when at 1:59 in, he laughs, just a little, at the simple and obvious and brilliant joke by the Bad Seeds, I’m sold. Book me a room.
I wish I knew the word that comes between ironic funny and just plain funny, ‘cos it’d be useful right now. Maybe that word is horsing around. And this song is crystalline perfect serious horsing around. Straight man to clown foil. How everything gets alittle quieter on the ‘deaf’ verse. How the pianist does those ‘dreamscape’ runs. How you’ll never see a sign hanging on the door saying “At no time may both feet leave the floor in this hotel anymore”. Recorded live at like 8am on KCRW, five cats in a little radio studio, sloppy, belting, laughing, goofing. And being so smart about it.
But most importantly, when Cave horses around in Judeo-Christian heaven it is never dismissive, and his teasing reveals My Father’s Mansion’s most important characteristic: Everybody’s got a room.
God’s Hotel (2.9MB MP3)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Red House Painters :: Have You Forgotten (extended)
I’m a sad cat. It’s no bigs; that’s just how I turned out. I was a quiet melancholic kid and I’ve grown into a decent man who leans closer to somber than pep. On the bright end of the birth canal I was dealt a full run in hope, aces in mourning, a couple queens of joy, and a lonely ten of exuberance. And yeah, there have been many chances to pass or throw off, but it seems I’m always ending up strong suited in heartsick, winning tricks with sentiment.
This is important: there is a difference between sad and cynical and depressed. I am not bleak nor mean. I am not sour and my bouts of pettiness seem to pass quick. Sad has no self-pity or cruelty in it. Sad is the oak in late March that is a month away from forgetting that the Spring ever comes. But sometime in April the ground thaws and the oak remembers.
When I was about eight years old, my grandparents and parents gave me a boombox. It had four equalizer buttons. This was before radio makers decided all listeners are idiots and started naming EQ buttons things like “jamming” and “bass bomb”. This EQ had a high pass filter and a low pass filter and a mid boost and a flat setting. You could select different combinations and then the ‘flat’ would reset them all. I spent days messing with these buttons and consider this boombox hugely responsible for my later interest in the technical aspects of recorded music.
Anyway, the first tape I got was called the Mellow Sixties. I still have it. It has that sick Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys’ song Different Drum on it; it has that great (and perhaps only?) drug smuggling anthem Coming into Los Angeles and it has the Byrds’ Turn Turn Turn. I have an impossibly vivid memory of listening to Turn Turn Turn on that boombox in my bedroom, rewinding it over and over and listening again and again while quietly sobbing. I don’t now, and didn’t know then, why. Something in the song rang true in a deep sad place in me and I guess, two dozen hands later, I still seem to hold that sad place close to my chest.
Lovely, sentimental, maudlin perhaps, maybe even corny. I should be embarrassed. But the apartment is empty and the sky is slate dusk-lit and everything I’ve seen and all that I’ve loved will first pass from this world and then pass from its memory. So by the third minute of the Red House Painter’s Have You Forgotten, I think I will forever be that same small boy in his bedroom, unwittingly heartbroke by song.
Have You Forgotten (extended)
Red House Painters (Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters, Mark Kozelek site)
(notes — A different version of this song originally appeared on Songs for a Blue Guitar in 1996. Whenever I imagine gambling through this life, I play pinochle. At about 7:40 (wait for it!) the guitar starts doing these double-time and triplet runs that are so lovely that I wish they soundtracked all of my dreams.)
the Who :: Baba O’Riley
The organ bloops. Townsend windmills. Moon tenderizes the drums. Daltry is whipping the mic around. Jon Entwistle stands stock still and straight faced while his blurred fingers dance across the strings and the fretboard.
It’s less than two years after Woodstock, ten months after Altamont. Everything’s gone south. The Weather Underground left a bomb for the NYPD. Vietnam drags on. And there is unease in the counter-cultural. In a year Townsend will write “Long Live Rock”, but today he travels in doubt.
The line is around the block. Another one sold-out. There are fucking fifty-thousand people out there.
It’s only teenage wasteland.
Baba O Riley
the Who (homepage)
(PS — you know the long solo at the end, that’s a viola, not a violin.)